# Influence without authority Canonical page: https://www.gabrielvaldivia.com/notes/influence-without-authority - Author: Gabriel Valdivia - Published: 2026-10-07T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T15:00:04.032Z Some of the most influential designers I’ve worked with had no direct reports. They didn't spend their days assigning work, running performance reviews, or deciding who got promoted. Yet they could change the direction of a project, raise the quality bar of a team, and sometimes change the strategy for the entire company. Individual contributors can develop influence by giving people reasons to trust their judgment, then finding ways for that judgment to travel beyond the things they personally make. ### Start with craft If you can only do one thing, then focus on the work. It will create the credibility that everything else depends on. When peers repeatedly see you identify the right problem, make good decisions, and produce strong work, they begin to trust your judgment beyond the artifact in front of them. Eventually, people start bringing you problems earlier. They ask what you think before a direction has been chosen. Your opinion begins carrying weight in areas you don't technically own. ### Give people something they can repeat The most influential ICs I've worked with are unusually good storytellers. They find simple ways to describe complicated ideas. They name their projects, create metaphors, and turn a fuzzy argument into a phrase someone remembers three meetings later. In a sense, they turn ideas into memes. This is one reason I've found it useful to study fields outside design. Standup comedians obsess over wording, pacing, and audience reaction. Filmmakers think about how information is revealed. Comic books compress complicated narratives into sequences of images. These disciplines are all solving different versions of the same problem: how do you make an idea land? Designers have stages everywhere: Looms, design crits, design reviews, all-hands meetings. Every one of them is an opportunity to practice explaining the work in a way that makes other people want to carry the idea forward. ### Make your thinking portable Your influence is limited if it only works while you're in the room. A large part of senior IC work is figuring out how to package your thinking so other people can carry it forward without you. The most obvious way to do this as an IC designer is to package your design thinking into easily shareable artifacts. A link, a video file, or a simple image becomes the vehicle to carry your ideas. This is important because decisions rarely happen in a single meeting. The person you presented to talks to their manager. The PM brings it into another conversation. An executive forwards it to someone you've never met. Eventually your idea is being discussed in rooms you aren't in. ### Create reusable solutions Influence becomes tangible when your solutions are embedded in the way the organization works. When it comes to pixels, this is where contributing to a design system or codebase becomes essential. By doing this, you contribute to not just your project, but every project that comes afterward. The same principle applies beyond design components. A useful critique format, research practice, prototype technique, framework, or way of communicating decisions can spread across a company. This is where influence begins to compound. You're contributing patterns that help other people make better decisions themselves. ### Help other people win The further you progress as an IC, the less useful it becomes to think about influence as getting people to agree with you. The more durable version of influence is becoming someone whose presence makes the people around them better. That might mean helping an engineer make a complicated interaction easier to build, giving a PM a prototype that makes their strategy easier to explain, or helping another designer sharpen an idea and then making sure they receive the credit for it. Understand what your peers are actually trying to accomplish. Ask them what would make a project successful from their perspective. Then use your craft to help them get there. --- Super ICs gain influence by repeatedly doing the unglamorous things: making the work better, making the story clearer, and making it easier for other people to succeed. Over time, that combination changes how people behave around you. If you focus on sharpening your craft, turning ideas into stories people can retell, packaging your thinking so it travels without you, and helping your peers hit their goals, authority becomes the natural side effect of being the person others rely on.